During Rausser’s four years of governmental appointment at the CEA and subsequently at the AID, he embraced the political dimension of public policy. He was well prepared from his scholarly work from his earlier research at the University of California, Davis. He and John Freebairn were the first to reveal preference to estimate what he defined as a “public policy preference function” This paper was published early in his career by the Review of Economics and Statistics and was based on an real world problem on a U.S. policy on beef imports. His foundation was also reflected by a stream of preliminary scholarly publications on what is perhaps is most important conceptualization on his lens on policy economy. This is his famous PERTs vs PESTs, characterizing political economic models in food and agriculture. This paper was initially a keynote address at the Annual Meetings of the AAEA in 1981. The presentation and the ultimate publication of this paper led to a host of seminars at Land Grant universities throughout the country to help educate the agriculture and resource economics profession. He later, in an article appearing in the journal of Economic Perspectives, provided a more detailed representation of the data that related to PERTs and PESTs. Perhaps more impost, he was able to demonstrate the complementary of PERTs and PESTs and the design of “smart PESTs” (see Alain de Janvry and Elizabeth Sadoulet chapter in this volume) The work on PESTs and PERTs, along with his work on rent-seeking behavior by powerful interest groups, set the framework for his seminal book publication with Jo Swinnen and P. Zusman (Rausser, Swinnen, and Zusman 2011). Other related work that won Outstanding Publication Awards include two papers with his PhD student, Bill Foster (Rausser and Foster 1990) and another with his PhD student, R.D. Innes (Innes and Rausser 1989).
The core framework has also been extended through multilateral bargaining formulations for analyzing water resource disputes. With this lens, more than 20 publications have appeared only three of which I highlight here: Adams, Rausser, Simon (1996); Rausser, Sayre, Simon (2011); Rausser, Sayre, Simon (2011)
More recently, this stream of scholarly work has turned to a theoretical evaluation of political power that arises in the context of exaggeration and counter exaggeration (Rausser, Simon, Zhao 2015), which has been extended once again to examine polarization, hyperbole and the political power that emerges from narrative control (Rausser, Simon, Zhao 2020).